Brenda Hudak was frightened for the welfare of her two granddaughters including 19-month-old Amanda A’laina Gallegos.

Amanda lived with her baby sister Trinity, father Damian Gallegos and teenage mother Dawn Hudak in the basement of an Adams County home where Brenda Hudak lived on the main floor.

Amanda Gallegos, photo courtesy Colorado Bureau of Investigation

Brenda called the Adams County child abuse hot line over and over. She wasn’t the only one calling.

Rachel Fleischaker, who worked with Brenda Hudak at Quest Diagnostics, said she and two co-workers also called the county’s child abuse line without results. Fleischaker said she once reported seeing that “Amanda had been spanked to the point where she was black and blue all over her thighs.”

The 19-month-old child and her younger sister had been hurt and were in danger.

But when social workers investigated the child’s injuries, Brenda didn’t get a sense that it was a thorough investigation.

In late 2000, Trinity nearly died. A sheriff’s report says Trinity was found “bluish-gray and unresponsive” before a deputy opened her airway.

The infant’s father “said he was walking up the stairs with the baby when he fell down, landing on the child,” Denver Post reporter David Olinger reported at the time.

According to Brenda, the injury temporarily paralyzed the right side of Trinity’s newborn body, but she was recovering in the care of adoptive parents.

The last time Brenda called human services, a caseworker told her that he did see Amanda’s bruises, but that he saw nothing that made him sick to his stomach.

The jury also convicted Lewis of three counts of attempted first-degree murder of two security guards and an off-duty police officer.

“This was a complicated case,” said Chief District Attorney Pete Stumpf. “We were fortunate to have a smart jury that worked hard and was able to sift through the evidence and reach a verdict that brings justice to the death of Mr. Minnick.”

Lewis drove three men to the Grizzly Rose on Dec. 12, 2008 and then drove her vehicle to a side street where she waited for the men to return, said Sue Lindsey, spokeswoman for the Adams County District Attorney’s Office.

The jury began deliberations Tuesday afternoon.

According to evidence presented during the week-long trial, Lewis drove three men to the Grizzly Rose on Dec. 12, 2008 and then drove her vehicle to a side street where she waited for the men to return.

The men opened fire on security guards and an off-duty police officer who went to investigate after seeing the men wearing bandanas over their faces in the parking lot.

Lewis will be sentenced at 1:30 p.m. on April 23.

Lewis and Gerald Michael Anthony Gurule, 32, were indicted by an Adams County grand jury last March.

Gurule is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, four counts of attempted first-degree murder and three counts of felony menacing. His trial is set for April 28.

Timothy Minnick’s life had been spiralling downward for years when he confronted masked thieves at the popular country and western nightclub Grizzly Rose.

In the years before his shooting death in the parking lot of the nightclub that featured the likes of Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift he had suffered some difficult setbacks.

Minnick had gone through two divorces.

A bank foreclosed on the 48-year-old’s Montbello home.

He moved into a mobile home, which was destroyed by fire in February 2007. His dog was killed.

Minnick had an Internet business, Intertec Web Solutions, which tanked because much of his clients’ data burned in the fire.

He declared bankruptcy months before his death.

Then another brother died of a massive heart attack.

“He was struggling to put everything back together,” his brother Leland Minnick has said.

To add insult to injury, the former Brighton police officer was working a job he didn’t like and was looking for something else. It was tough, though. The economy was bad and good jobs were scarce. He did have a girlfriend, though.

On Friday night, Dec. 12, 2008, Minnick was working at the nightclub that hosts some of the biggest country and western entertainers in the business and is one of the places to be during the National Western Stock Show.

A pretty 16-year-old Lakewood teen ran away from home in late February 1971.

Pamela Ann Williams’ body was discovered in another county weeks later.

Williams had lived with her parents and siblings at 1540 S. Carr St.

Pamela Williams

She was last seen alive by family on Feb. 27, 1971.

Williams was reported as a runaway shortly after.

Then on March 8, train engineer Ed Marsh was in a passing train when he spotted the body of the partially clothed girl.

Williams’ body was found dumped in bushes near Colorado 2 and E. 104th Avenue.

She had been shot twice in the right temple with a small-caliber gun, according to a March 9, 1971 Denver Post article.

She had been wearing a blue ski jacket and a purple dress. One of her shoes was found at the scene.

Adams County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Candi Baker has previously said homicide investigators recently sent DNA evidence from the case to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for testing but no matches were made with any suspects.

Investigators have followed every lead they get in the case, Baker said.

Name: John DoeBody found: Head found in a pond on July 14, 2001; legs found in a nearby field on July 20, 2001.Agency: Adams County Sheriff’s OfficeDate killed: Sometime in 2001Cause of death: Not determinedSuspect: none

On July 14, 2001, anglers saw a plastic bundle floating on the surface of a pond in an industrial area of Adams County at West 64th Avenue and Pecos Street.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.